Skinlab Still Stand Behind ‘Revolting Room’

In 2002, San Francisco groove metallers Skinlab released ‘Revolting Room,’ and the response wasn’t good. Skinlab tried to go big, and theirs fans disparaged them, branding the architects of 1999’s ‘Disembody: The New Flesh’ as nu metal sel ]\l outs. Looking back on the record now, some seven years later, does Skinlab bassist and frontman Steev Esquivel regret the band’s ‘Revolting’ turn?

“I’ve been waiting for this question,” he tells Noisecreep. “F— no. We thought it was a step forward. As you grow as a band, you wanna expand. You gotta take chances. With us, we took a chance and the f—ing scene switched under us like hot lava.”

Esquivel, who has reunited the band for an album — ‘The Scars Between Us,’ which drops Sept. 15 — and a tour with openers Mower, sits and thinks for a second. He lets out a telling chuckle, before returning to the subject of ‘Revolting Room,’ five songs from which make it onto the band’s set list for this current tour.

“Man, that record was a f—ing hot potato,” he recalls. “I remember I had everyone from [Machine Head‘s] Rob Flynn to [Testament‘s] Chuck Billy praising that record. F—ing everybody. And all of a sudden, the scene changed and that record became a hot potato. No one wanted to f—ing claim it. Well, we still claim that s—. That record is f—ing killer, man. Its just because the scene changed, and everyone starting licking ass on this new scene … we didn’t. We stayed true to what we are.”

Esquivel’s cognizant of the fact that Skinlab helped inspire a whole cluster of heavy bands, with Godsmack and Disturbed among them. When Skinlab started hearing all of these bands citing them as an influence, Esquiel says, “We started listening to that stuff, and we started going, ‘Wow, these bigger bands were influenced by us? Are we like that?'”

The next step, Esquivel admits, was the first step towards ‘Revolting Door.’ “We tried to write a really big record, and we took a chance, and I sang a little bit different,” he explains. “We brought in some different elements. We stuck our neck out there too much, and it allowed us to get spanked. But we stand behind that record, 100 percent. So … take that, man.”

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